The GuardianOne man’s tragic tale reveals much about the reach and harm of anti-science propaganda.

Nick Cohen

Gary Matthews fell headlong into a subterranean world haunted by vicious fantasies. But he wasn’t vicious himself. “I knew him since he was 19,” his friend Peter Roscoe told me. “He was a gentle guy. He wanted a better world. I am so sorry in recent times he became convinced that Covid was some kind of hoax.”

The “hoax” killed him, his relatives said. He had a positive Covid-19 test and went home to isolate. He died, aged 46, alone in his flat in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, on 13 January.

His short life and lonely death seem as far from the overindulged world of London’s anti-scientific right as it is possible to get. Matthews was hard up and all but unknown. He could never have been a Toby Young or Julia Hartley-Brewer. The Telegraph would never have let him write columns declaring with no evidence whatsoever that the common cold could provide “natural immunity” to Covid-19. Talkradio would never have paid him to shout that the “virus isn’t causing excess deaths any more” even as the corpses piled up in mortuaries. 

Continue reading @ The Guardian.

Mourn Gary Matthews And Recognise That Covid Conspiracies Endanger Life

The GuardianOne man’s tragic tale reveals much about the reach and harm of anti-science propaganda.

Nick Cohen

Gary Matthews fell headlong into a subterranean world haunted by vicious fantasies. But he wasn’t vicious himself. “I knew him since he was 19,” his friend Peter Roscoe told me. “He was a gentle guy. He wanted a better world. I am so sorry in recent times he became convinced that Covid was some kind of hoax.”

The “hoax” killed him, his relatives said. He had a positive Covid-19 test and went home to isolate. He died, aged 46, alone in his flat in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, on 13 January.

His short life and lonely death seem as far from the overindulged world of London’s anti-scientific right as it is possible to get. Matthews was hard up and all but unknown. He could never have been a Toby Young or Julia Hartley-Brewer. The Telegraph would never have let him write columns declaring with no evidence whatsoever that the common cold could provide “natural immunity” to Covid-19. Talkradio would never have paid him to shout that the “virus isn’t causing excess deaths any more” even as the corpses piled up in mortuaries. 

Continue reading @ The Guardian.

13 comments:

  1. anti-scientific right <--------I've gotten as far as that. WTF, I'm going for a spliff...

    WTF ....' anti-scientific right '....

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    1. Frankie

      If you have or had read the rest of the article, you have/would have seen that the anti-scientific right that Nick Cohen writes about refers to a coterie of right-wing journalists and columnists such as Toby Young, Peter Hitchens, Julia Hartley-Brewer and Alison Pearson who have been spreading untruths in august Tory publications like The Telegraph and Spectator and radio stations like LBC such as the common cold can provide "natural immunity" to Covid-19 or that 91% of "so-called" Covid cases are false positives.

      This article is indeed a searing indictment of Covid-19 and vaccine conspiracy mythologists and the harm that they can do.

      They are augmented by the libertarian Tory MP and uber-arsehole Desmond Swayne who is openly calling on people to refuse wearing masks and by the Brexshitters from the European Research Group of Tory MPs.

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  2. That was 10mins of my life I wont get back.

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  3. Nick Cohen writes a pro government lock down article which is more interesting for what he doesn't mention than for what he does tell us.

    He talks about one individual. He neither mentions any possible underlying health conditions or more importantly the absence of them. Lying by omission? At no point is Boris and the Tory government mentioned or indeed any indication given as to why this pour soul was left to die alone in a flat in Shrewsbury, while Nightingale hospitals all lay empty and neither equipped or staffed.

    It is merely another attempt to discredit those who see the bigger picture and have an alternative view than the 'let's all panic now' government line, not with logical debate or facts but with slander. We are to follow the MSM and ONE designated doom and gloom scientific 'expert' who cannot be debated or challenged.

    So, leaving Elvis at the door for a momentarily, lets just wonder about this for a moment. It needs to be repeated until people start complaining about it. Only then will the Covid19 ugly virus be defeated. What we know:

    PPE money power hosed by the BILLIONS to Tory Party buddies.
    Nightingale hospitals deliberately left empty. Like the big red bus during the Brexit campaign pledging 350 million to the NHS.
    Boris and Cummings initially wanted herd immunity but a fictitious fantasy modelling of a worst case scenario by Imperial College London Mr. Ferguson 'professor' of impending annihilation, be it bovine or human, scared the bejaysus out of them both. Changed policy to lockdown.
    Then eat out to help out.
    Lock down again.... and again
    5 days of Christmas...lock down again.
    Track and trace system was given to a Tory PR company rather than the 'beloved' NHS go figure....
    All the while elected reps disregarded the rules they imposed on everyone else.

    If this guy gave a monkeys about the man in question he wouldn't just be using his death to have a pop at those who don't just accept Boris and Co. at their word without question.

    SHAME ON HIM... another heartless Tory bastard no doubt.

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    1. Psst - Elvis has Covid but we are not allowed to tell anyone as the government and Big Pharma want to keep it a secret as they are going to try and turn him out for Liverpool this evening LOL

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    2. Larry


      "SHAME ON HIM... another heartless Tory bastard no doubt."

      If you knew or have read any of Nick Cohen's work you would know that he has always been a searing critic of Boris and his side-kick Michael Gove for the lies they manufactured during the EU referendum and that, far from being pro-government, he views Boris as a mini-Trump.

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    3. "Elvis has Covid but we are not allowed to tell anyone as the government and Big Pharma want to keep it a secret as they are going to try and turn him out for Liverpool this evening "

      Arsene Wenger just released a statement saying he was going to sign him once back in the day but it fell through uh huh huh

      Delete
  4. As a matter of interest, I believe if the 100,000 (soon to be between 110/120,000 once January added in) estimate of deaths WITH/VIA/BESIDE/UNDER/OVER/BESIDE Covide19 were to be analyzed and broken down poor Boris wouldn't look so bad.

    But.... I think in exaggerating the stats as a means of enforcing public compliance through fear/terror he has made a rod for his own back.

    HE WHO LIVES BY THE SWORD DIES BY THE SWORD Boris....'old chap'.

    He keeps this shit up the fakedemic will claim as many lives and the Irish fakefamine.

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    1. Larry

      When Covid-19 sceptics say that it is the same as the seasonal flu and that therefore the fatality rates are the same, they make their case on the claim that the Infection Ratio of Covid-19 - the number of people who die if they catch the disease- is quite low, somewhere around 0.1%.

      But that is is not the IFR of the flu; it's the Case Fatality Ratio (CFR). The IFR is the number of people who die if they are infected with the disease. Lots of people can be infected by a disease and remain asymptomatic; therefore we (and they) might never find out they are infected.

      The CFR refers to the number of people who have symptoms of a disease who die of it. The CFR is the number of deaths divided by the number of symptomatic cases and is normally a lot higher than the IFR, because people who have symptoms almost by definition have a worse disease than those who are asymptomatic.

      The CFR of Covid-19 is much higher than the CFR of flu. A current estimate of the CFR of Covid in the UK is 2.1%. This means a symptomatic case of Covid is 21 times deadlier than a symptomatic case of seasonal flu.



      /www.covidfaq.co/Claim-It-s-only-as-deadly-as-the-flu-024fc5546bc14806a4f402c9ee28316c

      Oh yes, Boris has the deaths of 100,000 people to account for but not because he "created the fakedemic" but because he has persistently refused to accept the advice of scientists and public health experts for lockdown only to change course after the horse bolts the stable door.

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  5. Mackers as a matter of interest do you and Barry under the bed and all the citizens with underlying health issues believe the opiod scandal in the USA was a conspiracy theory or Thalidomide in UK?

    Just curious.

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    1. Did Rangers not develop Thalidomide for the purpose of producing Celtic goalkeepers?

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  6. Mackers
    NO they produced LSD and sold us 3 fukn wingnitz

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  7. Barry Dr Tomy Holocaust full of shit. PCR tests are junk it is widely known and deliberately ignored by bat flu cheerleaders.
    1 in 3 have piles... Now that's a real paindemic.

    https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/dr-tony-holohans-urgent-plea-23414526

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